My point a out SV was that the two major open source simulation tools (Icarus and Verilator) both only support a subset of SV, and not SV 2017, but a lot of SV

My point a out SV was that the two major open source simulation tools (Icarus and Verilator) both only support a subset of SV, and not SV 2017, but a lot of SV 2009 is still not supported. Vivado has a free (not open) SV simulator that supports much more of the language. I agree not all of SV is needed for PnR, but what I'm saying is if we don't have the gcc or clang version of SV for simulation yet (vs MSVC or ICC), then what makes you think we'd get a near commercial grade synth / PnR tool? If Xilinx opened up their bitstream format, academics would rejoice, but it would not suddenly spur on a huge improvement in open source PnR tooling. In terms of improving the usability of what is there, given vivado is scriptable, if you want to make a better open one (like an IDE) you can, just call synth_design, etc in batch. This was what Heir Design were doing, and what turned into Vivado after they were acquired by Xilinx. So my point is lots of open source tooling could exist without opening the bitstream format, so given it largely does not, I am of the opinion opening the bitstream format would not change much.